sustainable fashion

Trishdarling and I love when it works out that we get to have a spare hour or two in NYC together and we can sneak off to a museum, usually the FIT Museum, for some inspiration. An exhibit last Fall at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery also offered inspiration: Ethics + Aesthetics = Sustainable Fashion. This beautiful exhibit was curated by Francesca Granata, Editor of Fashion Projects, and Sarah Scaturro, Textile Conservator at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Sarah agreed to have a darling interview chat with us and we are happy to share that with you here this week, like our own private museum tour. We hope you enjoy it, and are inspired.

Sarah at the Camouflage Takes Center Stage conference, Royal Military Museum, Brussels

Darlings: Tell us a little about your background and how you became inspired to study fashion and textiles?
Sarah: Being from Colorado (a supremely unfashionable state), I was never that aware of fashion growing up.  Of course I read magazines like Sassy and Seventeen, and my first job at age 14 was working for The Limited, but it never seemed like a field I wanted to enter. I moved to New York in the spring of 2001 after living for two years in Italy and Japan.  It was in Japan that I truly began to understand the power of fashion, both personally and socially.  I was inspired by their subcultures (the Loli-Goths and Ganguro girls), their amazing shopping malls, and the fact that almost every woman there carried a Louis Vuitton handbag.  I was a fashion outsider, as at 5’10” and a size 8, I was too big to fit into their clothes. This alienation allowed me to begin making my own anthropological observations about the role of fashion in Japanese society.

After moving to NYC I began taking Continuing Ed classes at FIT on tailoring and pattern-making, which led me to their MA program in Fashion and Textile Studies: History, Theory and Museum Practice.  When I read how the program focused holistically on the theoretical, sociocultural, historical and practical aspects of fashion and textile studies, along with the list of prerequisites (art history, chemistry, foreign languages – all of which I had taken and loved in undergrad), I realized that this was the perfect program for me.  It was an ideal mix of fashionable nerdiness which would allow me to pursue a career in museums, academia and corporate archiving.  Right after graduating I began my own consulting company, and immediately landed two clients – Jill Stuart (to organize her vintage inspiration archive) and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum (to rehouse ancient textiles).  Within six months I fortunately was able to convert to a full-time position at the Cooper-Hewitt, so now I work as the textile conservator responsible for preserving the 30,000+ textile collection and handling the exhibition display of all fashion and textiles, like for our recent Rodarte exhibition.

Darlings: We loved the Ethics + Aesthetics: Sustainable Fashion exhibit you co-curated earlier this year. Can you tell us a bit more about the mission and process of that? What was the main message you wanted people to walk away with?
Sarah: Francesca Granata (Fashion Projects) and I began working on this exhibition in 2006, when eco-fashion was still emerging as a major area of investigation and had yet to really reach the mainstream media.  We wanted to bring attention to all of the cool work that had been happening in the US, and in NYC in particular.  We were frustrated that the issues seemed to be getting some serious attention in Europe, and the UK especially, but that it was almost ignored here in the US.

After sending the proposal to a few venues and being turned down, we decided to focus our efforts on a place that would really nurture and support our thesis.  Pratt Manhattan Gallery (which is part of Pratt Institute) turned out to be the perfect location for our exhibition.  They have a really strong exhibition team, a beautiful architectural space, a solid investment in Pratt Institute’s sustainability initiatives, and furthermore, we had the opportunity to work closely with Pratt’s student body. Our exhibition was designed by a talented team of students in the Exhibition Design Intensive course – they really took our sustainability message to heart and produced one of the most beautiful, ecological, and modular exhibition designs that I’ve ever seen.

We decided to focus the exhibition on three areas, which we called Reduce, Revalue and Rethink (as a play on the environmental mantra of: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle).  The Reduce section centered on innovative materials, pattern-making and modularity (and included Loomstate, SANS and Bodkin), while the Revalue theme emphasized memories, handcrafting and community (SUNO, Alabama Chanin and Susan Cianciolo). Our Rethink section was the most radical, as it sought to directly challenge the fashion system by seeking alternate consumer paradigms and production models by including Andrea Zittel’s Smockshop and designer Mary Ping’s Slow and Steady Wins the Race line. The overarching goal of the exhibition was to expand the notion of “sustainability” beyond simplistic notions such as “organic vs. non-organic” to include ways in which we approach our relationship to clothing and the fashion system.

Darlings: Tell us about what/where you teach? What is the toughest part of teaching?
Sarah: I adore teaching and mentoring. I came to the field of fashion and textile studies after having already had another career in the non-profit sector, so I’m very passionate about finally having found something that I really love. I teach quite a bit, both as an adjunct at FIT in the Fashion and Textile Studies MA program, where I show students how to manage fashion and textile collections, and in NYU’s IFA program, in which I teach textile structure to art conservation students.  I also do a lot of guest lecturing on the relationship between fashion, technology and sustainability, especially for NYU’s ITP program.

Even in the short span that I’ve been teaching, I’ve noticed the students getting a lot savvier about technology, internships, and fashion studies in general.  The field is growing by leaps and bounds, especially here in NYC with the recent addition of Parson’s MA program in Fashion and Textile Studies. The toughest part of my job is having to give my students a dose of reality in the fact that even though there are a lot more graduates and interest in the field – this hasn’t yet translated to more jobs. There are very few full-time, permanent jobs out there, and the ones that exist are poorly paid and highly competitive. What I’m trying to inspire in my students is the desire to strike out on their own – to do something innovative and outside the norm. They should view the challenges more as opportunities to really push the field forward.

Darlings: What impact is the internet having on sustainable fashion and textiles?
Sarah: A fantastic impact! There are so many different approaches towards sustainable fashion and nearly all of it is dependent on the immediacy of the internet. I particularly love the style blogs that show how living sustainably can easily be achieved. Some of my favorites are still “the originals” like Jill Danyelle’s FiftyRX3 and The Little Brown Dress. These days I like to follow Johanna Bjork, from Goodlifer and Concrete Flower, as she shows how sustainability is really a mindset, and a fun one at that! I have friends who are independent designers, like Titania Inglis and Tara St. James of Study NY who really use the web as a place to show their work, grow their networks and muse about their inspirations and experiences. I know they are particularly excited about emerging websites like Source4Style, which allows designers to source sustainable fabrics much easier and more quickly than before. Then of course there are the sites that are constantly revealing new “eco” products, like Ecouterre.com. My personal favorite, which is more like a meditation on the beauty of our world, is Ecco*Eco run by the artist and curator Abigail Doan. I could go on and on, but I might as well direct you to my chapter called “Digital and Democratic” about the role of the internet in sustainable fashion in the soon-to-be published second edition of The Fashion Reader by Berg Publishers.

Darlings: Can you see the day when the fashion industry is lean, mean and green…or is that still way too far off in the future? Can you help us visualize by describing what that might look like?
Sarah: Yes – and no! I don’t think that sustainability is a passing trend. In the future, all design, if it is going to be considered “good” design must take into account social and environmental responsibility. I don’t necessarily see the fashion industry as getting leaner – smarter, maybe. Fashion is really a business based on capitalist values – once fashion companies realize that sustainable fashion (true sustainability, not just greenwashing) makes good economical sense, then I don’t think it will take them long to get into line.

What I’m really concerned with is the consumer. How do we inform and educate the consumer as to which is the best way to “become” sustainable? The beauty about fashion today, especially with the help of the internet, is that it is incredibly diverse and wonderfully messy. There are so many small fashion tribes out there that are creating their own unique styles. Fashion’s democratization means that anyone can participate and change it for their own purposes. I’ve tried to address the lack of consumer education through the Hacking Sustainable Fashion workshops that I co-lead with Giana Gonzalez of Hacking Couture. In the workshops, we try to lead the participants in creating their own “fashion manifesto” by giving them the code for sustainable fashion (based on my research) and then encouraging them to hack into it, changing and adding to it so that it fits their lifestyles best.  The wonderful thing about sustainability is that there are so many ways to go about it!

Darlings: Do you think independent, smaller, fashion houses or brands fit into a sustainable future for fashion?
Sarah: The pace of the fashion cycle is getting so fast, and there are so many options out there, that it is actually leading to consumer fatigue and paralysis. In fact, Alvin Toffler predicted this in his 1970 book Future Shock. The 1960s were a time of great advances in fashion, especially with the rise of youth culture, street fashion, and manufacturing and material innovations (all of which were the forerunners of today’s disposable fast fashion system). This was followed by the reactionary “return to nature” aesthetic and approach of the 1970s.  I think we are going through a similar cycle in that consumers are beginning to get fatigued by the crappy, cheap clothing and fast turnover produced by large fashion chains. They are seeking a sense of authenticity and nostalgia which is being expressed in the revamping of a lot of heritage brands like Pendleton and the popularity of vintage clothing.  I see independent designers combating this consumer fatigue by virtue of their singular vision and exclusiveness. I think the challenge for these independent designers is in figuring out how to be economically viable. Some of these designers are using their status as “eco” designers to help fuel sales and publicity, but I’m not sure how well this will work in the future once sustainability becomes the status quo. That being said – I don’t think the demand for independent design will disappear.  People will always want something special, handcrafted and uniquely theirs. Fashion’s inherently splintered nature ensures that there will always be a space for an independent and local vision.

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